With today's more and more global world, with companies being global and interacting with other companies around the world and with today's constantly improving telecommunications means, it gets more and more common with conference meetings instead of personal meetings. It is a convenient, inexpensive and efficient way of conducting meetings as it does not require the different participants to travel long distances, which saves both time and money.
Sometimes all the participants know each other, but quite often at least some of the participants are not known to all other participants and also do not know all the other participants. It is desirable to provide information to all participants regarding who is currently talking in order both to make the meeting more personal but foremost to know who is saying what.
People may participate in meetings and conferences in several different ways, for example from a conference room, or from a personal computer or mobile phone. When a person participates using a personal device, this person may most often be recognized by the conference system by detecting the device that he/she is using so that the identity, i.e. the name of the person, can easily be displayed to the other participants when speech is received from that personal device.
A person may e.g. partake in a conference session utilizing a mobile phone. In case a person is utilizing a mobile phone for a conference session in a conference room, the interaction with any other participants in the same conference mom becomes unnatural. Usually, a conference room or the like is equipped with apparatuses, such as video cameras, microphones, displays, speakers and so on, by means of which the participants partake in a conference session. In case a participant is using a personal device in such a conference room, the interaction between any other participants in this room may be experienced as unnatural, as the natural behavior would be to utilize the equipment in the conference room for partaking in the conference session.
Most conference solutions involve using a conference room where multiple users or participants partake in the conference session and the conference session itself is established with one or more other conference rooms or participants at other locations. In this scenario, it is difficult to provide information to all participants regarding who is currently talking. Often, it is just possible to display an identity, such as a name, of the conference room so that all participants in a conference room, from which speech is received, are grouped together, without individual identification.
In some video conferencing solutions, one or more cameras are used that automatically zoom in on the participant who is currently talking. However, this function merely provides a view of the active speaker to the other participants, who may or may not recognize the speaker in view.